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"The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers."

At press time, Harbaugh had sent Michigan’s athletic department an envelope containing a heavily annotated seating chart, a list of the 63,000 seat views he had found unsatisfactory, and a glowing 70-page report on section 25, row 12, seat 9, which he claimed is “exactly what the great sport of football is all about.”

Source: OSU has "no chance" at Dunn or Kalis

Wow. This coming from the family member of an OSU player. These guys aren't just decommitting, they have written off going to OSU. Remember, there are current and former OSU players who went to the same high school as Kalis and Dunn respectively. Word going around at both St. Eds and GlenOak are that the Buckeyes have "no chance" at landing either of them.

What a complete 180 for Kalis. I'm not surprised in the least about Dunn. When I interviewed him two months ago and he said he was "opening things back up" that told me he was basically decommitting. But Kalis was Mr. Buckeye talking about how much he loved OSU and that he was going to recruit like crazy to get other top prospects to join him in Columbus. He reminded me of Brewster and Justin Zwick in that respect.

"Wow" doesn't quite cover it unless it's the sort of wow that goes along with a fondness for hot dogs. Flipping Dunn and Kalis would see Michigan graduate from drinking MSU's milkshake to drinking OSU's. It's gotten so bad for the Buckeyes that the Spartans are drinking OSU's milkshake, nabbing Se'Von Pittman. If Aldophus Washington commits to Purdue next week put the entire state of Ohio on suicide watch.

What are Michigan's chances of flipping the decommit(-ish) duo? Well, Kalis's visit in particular seems to coincide with last weekend's OL visit madness—if he is going to jump ship he's got to do it quickly and it appears Michigan is pretty much his list outside of OSU, about whom see above. Dunn is wobblier since he hasn't actually committed yet and Penn State is a factor, but if the above is reliable Michigan would have to be the favorites.

Later Biddle says Brady Hoke is "negatively recruiting the hell out of OSU," which causes the requisite amount of swooning from the daintier folks in the thread. Specifically:

He's telling these guys that OSU will get hit harder than USC and they "shouldn't fall for the same (stuff) Lane Kiffen sold all those SC recruits."

Heavens to Betsy.

NFL not so much. The National Football Post has a really interesting, extensive piece in which Michigan's seniors are evaluated for NFL potential. No one other than Mike Martin rates highly, but some of that is because of Michigan's zone system. David Molk:

A shorter, compact lineman who looks nearly maxed out physically, despite weighing 288-pounds. Looks a little tight hipped trying to sit into his stance, but has a quick first step and snaps and steps very quickly. Creates leverage for himself consistently, extends his arms and can easily reach and seal on the plays off his frame. Displays a compact, sturdy punch and can stun defenders at the point. Looks really natural when asked to quickly reach block on runs to the perimeter, as he’s coordinated getting his feet around and can seal the edge routinely. Displays natural range/balance getting into blocks at the second level as well. Breakdowns well showcases the ability to routinely seal on contact.

This is three years of UFR on Molk in one paragraph. Molk is praised as a "perfect fit" for Michigan's run-first spread offense but only a potential starter in a zone scheme. If he's big enough he could end up one of those guys who gets drafted in the seventh round and plays for a long time for a good team whilst remaining totally anonymous.

Whole piece is worth a read; it's really interesting to see a professional break down Michigan players after you've formed your own opinions of them. Nothing seems particularly off base.

Hybrid until you die. I've tried to make the case that the 4-3 under is halfway between a conventional 4-3 and 3-4. My basis for the assertion usually revolves around the idea the strongside defensive end and three-tech defensive tackle are more alike than the three-tech and the nose tackle or the SDE and the weakside end. Here's a bit more ammo for that POV from an interview on Touch The Banner with Matt Godin:

"We have the main position which I'm going to play, which is the 5-technique. I guess you'd consider it more D-tackle, but I'll also play outside...I'm only going to have one guy blocking me. It's more of an outside position, actually, but I'm going to be run stopping a lot, too."

The confusion in that statement is considerable, but when he says "outside" he probably means he's going to get a look at WDE. I'm guessing that look will be brief since he's already 270 and with Roh/Beyer/Black/Ojemudia/Brown hanging out at that spot he's probably not going to bring as much pass rush as the winner of that derby.

So when you're looking at the recruiting class you can roughly bin the three-tech DTs with the SDEs; many of those guys will flip from one to the other like Ryan Van Bergen and Brandon Graham before them. If Michigan's two committed SDEs, Godin and Tom Strobel, are really 6'6" each they're a bit taller than you'd like at the three tech, which should leave a spot open for a Danny O'Brien who's more of a fit there, but rumor has it that's not the case. Like everyone else on the internet I'd much rather have a DT than a fullback or a sixth OL, but the internet does not call the shots.

This institution is mad under control, yo. The 65-page Notice of Allegations lodged against UNC yesterday contains many, many allegations headlined by one of their assistant coaches acting as a runner for an NFL agent. It does not allege the dreaded lack of institutional control, which should have Trojan fans running to Los Angeles Torch & Pitchfork.

Blake's nefarious role in all this (which includes his own unethical conduct charge for withholding information from investigators) is the biggest source of mystery as to how his boss, Davis, managed to avoid the NCAA's wrath. In a document outlining its Principles of Institutional Control, one of the acts the Committee cites as "likely to demonstrate lack of institutional control" is if "A head coach ... fails to monitor the activities of assistant coaches regarding compliance." But it then follows that up with: " ... the head coach cannot be charged with the secretive activities of an assistant bent on violating NCAA rules." Apparently the school did a bang-up job portraying Blake as just such a character, absolving Davis and the school for failing to uncover his secret employer.

Because of that, North Carolina may have staved off the most severe imaginable penalties, but you have to imagine they're still going to be pretty rough. Maybe it's a one-year postseason ban instead of two. Maybe it's 10 docked scholarships instead of 20. Either way, three years' worth of wins are about to be vacated.

The biggest question: Will Davis keep his job? That one will be entirely up to the school.

I'm baffled. I'm not sure how you can possibly suggest anything was under control at UNC. I'm also in favor of removing that bit on not charging the head coach for secretive activities of his assistants. Here the canard about how you can't follow 100 college-age kids around is even more ridiculous: Butch Davis has nine assistant coaches. He should be expected to know whether one of them is working for Gary Wichard.

Mandel's just speculating when he says the UNC case will cause a smaller ripple than those of OSU and USC. I think he's likely to be wrong about OSU if only because we've already got a meaty notice of allegations in the UNC case and until that document hits for OSU we've got no idea what the NCAA will decide is impermissible in Columbus. But if he's right it's going to be a blow to this whole We're Serious Now, You Guys, Seriously campaign Mark Emmert is running. The document the NCAA produced on UNC should be enough for a firebombing.

Meanwhile, Oregon has managed to dig up some more stuff they got from Will Lyles: four spreadsheets with erratically reliable information about 2012 and 2013 recruits sent in February and March of this year, more than ten months after Oregon wrote him a check. The NCAA can't possibly buy what Oregon's selling, can they?

The next year is when the NCAA decides whether implausible deniability is a proper defense. Here's hoping the answer is

Reverse Righthaven. Rivals' Tom Dienhart sat down with Rich Rodriguez for an interview. It's the same boilerplate you'd find in any interview with a guy who'd like a head coaching job in the near future save for this small bit on Pryor:

Are you surprised by what is going on at Ohio State?

"I know some of it because we were close to the situation when I was at Michigan and part of the rivalry, the recruitment of Terrelle Pryor and all of that."

Ok, then.

It's about 1500 words. The Detroit News took 750 of them as an "excerpt" for an article in the paper without so much as linking the original piece or writing anything around it. The News just up and took half of a published article and republished it. The only explanation is there's some sort of content sharing agreement, but since Scout's Sam Webb writes for the news and Rivals' Josh Helmholdt for the Free Press, that doesn't seem likely. The News is so internet hood, yo.

The best part is that when I C&Ped the News article into Live Writer to get a word count it automatically inserted a "read more" link to the News. False.

Lonnie White got paid at USC back in the 80s. Also, The Daily (not that Daily) figured out this ASCII thing.

Grantland commissions Brian Phillips to write on Roger Federer, a great example of the site picking the cream of blogging-type people and not just the Klostermans of the world. Only problem is the obvious one when writing a footnote-laced article about Federer: you have giant posthumous looming competition.

If reporters looked like this the world would be a different, stranger place. College Football Live called up a local Morgantown reporter to discuss what Doctor Saturday has dubbed "As The Couch Burns." They immediately improved said reporters self-image:

If Mike Casazza woke up today with wolves and a fridge full of chocolate milk this is why.

"Mentor." The Dispatch FOIAs Tressel's communications with one Ted Sarniak and comes up with a heavily redacted set of information that invites questions as to who is mentoring who, exactly:

After Tressel received an April 2, 2010, email from a former player warning him of potential NCAA violations, the coach exchanged 77 calls and text messages with and spent a total of 4 1/2 hours talking on the phone with Ted Sarniak, the hometown mentor of quarterback Terrelle Pryor in Jeannette, Pa.

Their longest phone conversation - 18 minutes - happened on Dec. 21, two days before OSU announced Pryor and five others would be suspended for part of the 2011 season for violations.

The two also spoke for three minutes immediately after the Dec. 23 news conference benching Pryor, Daniel Herron, DeVier Posey, Solomon Thomas and Mike Adams for five games and Jordan Whiting for one game.

Tressel and Sarniak exchanged text messages on March 8, the day OSU announced that Tressel had known about the violations for months.

Sarniak will now offer tearful testimony about how Jim Tressel made him into a man. There's still a bunch of stuff that's redacted with OSU claiming it's "personal," but OSU also tried to withhold Chris Cicero's name and a bunch of other things besides that they had no legal ground to do so. That doesn't much matter since the NCAA can ask to see them on pain of pain. (I think, anyway. Lawyer me in the comments if I'm wrong).

"Any time that there is a mistake, or any time that there is an issue that flares up, and we go back through and scrub everything very, very carefully," he said. "We want to make certain that we're asking all the right questions."

It is not a mistake to engage in a months-long cover-up, just like it's not a mistake to give Jim Tressel a gentle massage when you find out he's violated a very serious NCAA bylaw. Nor is it a "mistake" to ignore two separate warnings that you are barely checking on your athlete's cars, or a "mistake" to talk with Terrelle Pryor's shady handler for four and a half hours.

Meanwhile, that article has another insight into OSU's compliance department:

The university's compliance department, however, did warn another university about a former Buckeyes player who has been linked to the NCAA scandal.

In January, former Ohio State running back Jermil Martin enrolled at Ashland University, an NCAA Division II school midway between Columbus and Cleveland.

Martin was cited in the SI article as a guy with a close relationship with Rife, so the eligibility issues they reported to the DII school should have led to an investigation and so forth and so on. Instead it was all like "whoops, third string fullback, you did bad and have to go and It Is Fortunate you are the only one."

On the other hand, OSU has just updated (in April) its compliance procedures to the satisfaction of the auditing committee. Close that barn door, baby.

Steelebits. Via Get The Picture, Michigan returns a higher percentage of its yards on offense than almost anyone—they're tenth at 93%. And they only graduate one starter on the line. The offense was going to take a step back in terms of FEI and other advanced metrics just by regressing to the mean, but trying to parse out how much of that is going on versus how much the offensive transition is hurting things is going to be difficult.

Actually, it might not be if they just can't run (or throw) out of the I. That'll be something tracked in UFRs. Because it's interesting, not because I am full of hate. Hoke Uber Alles.

Pistons need tough leader like Isiah Thomas as coach

If only we had known about this before a dollar of penicillin could have prevented this tragedy. Isaiah Thomas will sexually harass the players, yo, and then he will do what he's done to every NBA team he's ever come in contact with: make them so much worse than you ever thought possible.

Etc.: Mike Hamilton resigns. With OSU on the Volunteer path that means Gene Smith has a couple months before he does the same.

Remember CARA? Michigan's NCAA troubles began when the compliance forms designed to track countable hours stopped getting submitted in a timely fashion. One of Michigan's regular internal audits came around, noticed the empty file, and wrote something stern about it. Someone who has hopefully been fired with prejudice leaked that report, the Free Press piled on that molehill like a mofo, and bam: major-ish NCAA violations. The whole saga is encapsulated in a lengthy rant on this site.

An audit of Ohio State University's compliance department in November found that it was not doing enough to monitor the use of cars, uniforms and equipment by athletes.

… The OSU auditors wrote in November that the department needed to pay more attention to athletes' cars, particularly those driven by football players, and needed more control over the inventory of uniforms and equipment.

At this point Tressel had already failed to act on Cicero's email and the legal department was just about to stumble on this fact.

In Michigan's case they ended up releasing a torrent of emails from compliance to the football administrators that went unreplied to. (The only figure censured in the final report still at Michigan is Labadie-badgerer Ann Vollano.) In Ohio State's case it seems more like willfull ignorance, as the Dispatch buries its lead way at the bottom of its article:

In 2006, the auditors' review of athletes' car registration forms found that they were incomplete and sometimes inconsistent with the car registry maintained by University Transportation and Parking. Compliance officials vowed to correct the problem.

But last year, the auditors reviewed car registrations of 152 athletes and observed vehicles driven by football players to spring practice. Auditors found that 44 athletes bought parking permits for, received parking tickets in, or were seen driving cars that weren't registered.

Records obtained in May show that football players continue to submit incomplete forms, lacking sales prices, dates of purchases, co-signers and other required information.

That is an obvious, huge problem that Ohio State officials took no action on despite problems existing five years ago. Dollars to donuts the bulk of those odd cars were being driven by football players. Probably a third of the team was driving around in cars they had not registered with the department. They cleverly hid this fact by driving those cars to practice.

It makes me fist-shakingly angry to hear the new Pryorlawyer's spin about this—he just buys a new car every three months and takes them on test drives and this keeps happening despite getting two heinous speeding tickets. This does not happen to humans. It only happens to Buckeyes.

In The Tank

On a similar note, man, the Dispatch is fanboi central. You do not need to be told this. They have a "days since Michigan beat OSU" clock. But if they had any stones at all they would have turned this up years ago. In a way we might actually be thankful to them since the pattern of don'tgiveadamn got longer and longer as they asked Tressel about how awesome he was, but it's telling that all the Dispatch stories are coming from the news side of the aisle. Toy department in full effect.

As an example, by miraculous coincidence I actually read a Facebook message someone had sent me*; This message was attached to a message the guy had previously sent me in 2008, when Ohio State defensive lineman Doug Worthington picked up a DUI. Doug Lesmerises of the Plain Dealer checked the VIN number of what the police report said was a "2004 Cadillac station wagon" and found the car was in fact an Escalade. Homer McHomer (AKA Ken Gordon) at the Dispatch left that out of the story, causing one of those internet newpaper tiffs in which the principals gently poke at each other while maintaining solidarity against the masses.

Meanwhile, even Lesmerises missed kind of a thing when he attempted to explain the discrepancy:

What exactly does that mean?

Not that much, according to Richard Morman, the deputy chief of police for the OSU campus police. He said that Worthington had recently purchased the Escalade (which goes for about $20,000 to $24,000 according to the Kelley Blue Book). According to Morman, the dealer put his old plates, from what Morman said was a GMC sports utility vehicle, on the Escalade and told Worthington to make sure the plates were properly transferred

Lesmerises noticed the discrepancy between what the car was supposed to be on the police report and what the campus police said, but didn't follow up. That's better than Homer McHomer playing see no evil, but something less than dogged.

This section will probably get me a sarcastic tweet from a newspaper guy comparing this section to my reaction to the Free Press. So: I've never been against digging, just being completely wrong and sensational.